Posted on 11/05/2002 12:59:27 PM PST by AmericanInTokyo
By Elaine Monaghan in Washington and Daniel McGrory (U.K. Times, London)
THE man killed by an unmanned CIA aircraft in Yemen yesterday was the mastermind behind the suicide attack on the USS Cole in which 17 sailors died, according to the United States. Ali Qaed Sunian al-Harthi was a key ally of Osama bin Laden and was on the FBI’s most-wanted list. He died with five other al-Qaeda suspects when their car was struck by a Hellfire missile launched by a CIA drone.
Last night Donald Rumsfeld, the US Defence Secretary, declined to say whether CIA agents based in the region might have had any part in the blast.
“I’m not going to get into arrangements that we have with the Government of Yemen,” he said at a Pentagon briefing. However, a US official admitted: “As I understand it, it was an agency drone.”
Islamic militants claimed that the vehicle had been hit by a missile. It was believed that the group had been tracked from their mountain-top hideout by the satellite telephone that they had been using.
Eyewitnesses said that a military helicopter had opened fire on the vehicle after it was torn apart by missiles just after it had pulled off a main road into the desert at al-Naqaa, 125 miles east of the capital, Sanaa.
Yemeni officials would not say whether they suspected that the group had been on its way to carry out a terrorist operation.
They gave no details of what had caused the blast, but said that there were explosives, sophisticated communications equipment and weapons packed inside the four-wheel-drive vehicle. Its burnt-out wreckage was taken away to the town of Marib yesterday, but human remains, ammunition and a satellite telephone were left lying in the sand.
The main suspect, better known as Abu Ali, has been described as being a long-time friend of bin Laden and may have been among the few to know the al-Qaeda leader’s present whereabouts.
His death is being seen by Western intelligence agencies as a severe blow to al-Qaeda, which in recent weeks had shown signs of renewing its activities, including a suicide bomb attack on a French oil tanker off the Yemeni coast, which killed one crew member.
The same tactics were used in the attack on the USS Cole in October 2000, while it was refuelling in the port of Aden, which the FBI and others have blamed on Abu Ali, who they have called al-Qaeda’s “godfather in Yemen”.
The al-Sahwa newspaper said yesterday that Abu Ali had been a close companion of bin Laden when al-Qaeda had its headquarters in Sudan.
When al-Qaeda was forced to find a new base in 1994, bin Laden is reported to have sent his old friend to Yemen, his ancestral home, to investigate the possibility of moving there.
American forces are in Yemen helping local security forces to break up al-Qaeda cells hiding in the south of the country, where sympathetic tribal leaders are known to give them sanctuary.
When Yemeni security forces raided what they thought was Abu Ali’s desert hideout in Marib Province last December, 18 soldiers and three villagers were killed, but their prey vanished.
Yemeni officials say that they are holding 85 alleged al-Qaeda suspects. The arrests are said to include bin Laden’s youngest wife, Amal al-Saddah, 20, who was arrested at her father’s home last month, where she had been sent for safekeeping.
The Helicopter[s] on station was/were probably US Marine Cobra gunship[s].
With all of that said...
It was probably just what has been reported. A CIA Predator shoot.
Compare the tails of these two planes. In one, they point down and in the other they point up. What's going on? Have they changed the design? Which is newer and which older? How would this affect the performance?
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